Category: interesting

Data had long shown that seismic waves travel significantly faster below that depth, and geologists had believed that this was due to a “basement” of basalt. Instead, the difference was discovered to be a change in the rock brought on my intense heat pressure, or metamorphic rock. …

…this deep rock was found to be saturated in water.

Because free water should not be found at those depths, scientists theorize that the water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms which were squeezed out of the surrounding rocks due to the incredible pressure. The water was then prevented from rising to the surface because of the layer of impermeable rocks above it.

Another unexpected find was a menagerie of microscopic fossils as deep as 6.7 kilometers (4.2 miles) below the surface.

More at Damn Interesting.
An overview from the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska
Eight North American locations have emerged as potential candidate sites for a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

About 20 years ago I bought a report written by the institutes and scientists in the USSR about the drilling at Kola Penninsula. The high pressures and crystalline formations truly open new horizons and challenge our theories.

Water, water, everywhere, and..

 

Eureka! I’m high!
“Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.

The “click” of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.”

read more

IBM has built a transistor that runs about 100 times faster than current chips. The advances will show up in real products within a couple years, probably in chips to power super-fast wireless networks capable of moving a DVD-quality movie in as little as 5 seconds.

“What we’ve done in demonstrating this is that we’re nowhere near having tapped the limits of silicon performance, and that’s very encouraging…” Meyerson said.

The transistor achieved a speed of 500 gigahertz, which is more than 100 times speedier than the fastest PC chips sold today, and about 250 times faster than the typical mobile telephone chip.

Story at Yahoo Tech News

While the fragmented robotics market is now in its infancy, forecasts call for the industry to grow into a multibillion-dollar market in the next five to 10 years.

“We believe this is a key part of the future of computing,” said Microsoft Robotics Group general manager Tandy Trower, who called robots the next evolution of the personal computer.

Microsoft Robotics Studio is new software is meant to bootstrap the robotics industry much in the way that Microsoft’s operating system helped get the personal computer industry going.

The best-kept secret in the U.S. about the Holocaust is that Poland lost six million citizens or about one-fifth of its population: three million of the dead were Polish Christians, predominantly Catholic, and the other three million were Polish Jews.

The second best-kept secret of the Holocaust is the greatest number of Gentile rescuers of Jews were Poles, despite the fact that only in Poland were people (and their loved ones) immediately executed if caught trying to save Jews.

via ShoutWire

I didn’t know this.

PET scans show a boost in brain activity when addicts see images of drug usage.

“To make the drug-cues video, we worked with addicts who advised us on how to make it as realistic as possible while simulating scenes involving smoking or snorting cocaine,” said Wang. The scientists also asked the subjects to rate their level of craving while watching both videos, and assessed the severity of their addiction using a standard cocaine craving scale.

Dopamine levels were measured indirectly using positron emission tomography (PET) scanning at Brookhaven’s Center for Translational Neuroimaging. Each subject was injected with a radiotracer designed to bind to dopamine receptors in the brain. During scanning, the PET camera picks up the signal from any bound radiotracer so that levels of tracer bound to receptors can be compared with levels in the blood. As the body’s natural dopamine levels rise, this “endogenous” dopamine competes with the tracer for binding sites, so less radiotracer can bind to the receptors. Therefore, the lower the bound tracer signal, the higher the concentration of endogenous dopamine.

Compared with the neutral video, the cocaine-cues video triggered a significant increase in dopamine in the dorsal striatum, a part of the brain involved in experiencing desire or motivation. The changes in dopamine were associated with the level of craving reported by the subjects and were largest in the most severely addicted subjects.

This finding is consistent with previous animal studies that have suggested a role for the dorsal striatum in cue-induced craving. In those studies, neutral stimuli such as a particular cage environment that had been paired with a drug during “training” sessions later triggered a dopamine increase in both the nucleus accumbens and the dorsal striatum, a response that was correlated with drug-seeking behaviors in the animals.

Frustrated desires for food also cause a rise in brain dorsal striatum dopamine levels.

The finding is also consistent with earlier Brookhaven research documenting dopamine increases in the dorsal striatum induced by exposure to food (see this release). In that study, healthy subjects were allowed to observe and smell their favorite foods, but not eat them; the more the subjects desired the foods, the higher their dopamine levels went.

“Finding this same association between dorsal striatum dopamine levels and cravings for food and drugs suggests that, in the human brain, drug addiction engages the same neurobiological processes that motivate food-seeking behaviors triggered by food-conditioned cues,” Volkow said. This research suggests that compounds that could inhibit cue-induced striatal dopamine increases would be logical targets for medication development to treat cocaine addiction.

At FuturePundit’s Brain Addiction:

“These findings suggest to me that compounds which inhibit or reduce desire for cocaine might also reduce cracvings for food. A drug developed to treat coke addicts might also help people to lose weight.

“Also, since the vast bulk of us experience food cravings we non-drug addicts probably understand the cravings that drive drug addicts better than many of us realize. Obese people who look down their noses with disapproval at drug addicts ought to go look in the mirror and look at the signs that they have their own very similarly caused cravings which they can not control.

“Some day we will gain the ability to tune our desires to better align our daily behavior with our longer term goals. Research into drug addiction, obesity, and other problems with human minds will produce much more than just treatments to suppress desires for food and drugs. We will also gain the ability to mold what causes our minds to feel satisfied, frustrated, impatient, happy, and sad. People will adjust their emotional reactions to make them better able to do tedious work and to pursue longer term goals.”

Community is a knitwork network.

Community is billions of rapidities, mobilizing point to place, place to point.

Community is an intermodal multinodal template of comprehension.

Community is the modelling of mind to mechanism.

Peephole Reverse Viewer

The Tactical Door Viewer (about $90) was developed with the help of the law enforcement industry to help them assess potential hazards behind dwelling doors.

This peephole reverse viewer is simple to use and can be carried in your pocket for use anytime.

The officer places the reverse viewer over the peephole in the door and can look into the dwelling without alerting anyone inside.

The Times recently published a curious article on the science of empathy after a case where an eight year-old girl broke her leg and several drivers apparently drove past without caring to stop and help.

Apart from the grating “empathy has a physical location” (the spirit of phrenology lives on…) it’s a brief but interesting look at some of the emerging research into empathy, although doesn’t do a great job of tying it together into a coherent overview.

For those wanting a more in-depth (and more accurate) look at the neuroscience of empathy, a 2003 review article by Drs Jean Decety and Philip Jackson is a fantastic four-page romp through the recent research in the area.

Link to article ‘In a sorry state of mind’.
Link to Decety and Jackson article on empathy.

Item at the excellent Mind Hacks

Note:

I met a fella a few years ago who had attempted suicide by crashing into an oncoming schoolbus with much sad injury. After years in court and much therapy he learned from his psychologists that he had little empathy. His brain lacked activity when presented with provocative stimuli originating from other people, affirmed by brain scans. He practiced various mental exercises in hope of increasing his ‘sense of others’. Alas, there must have been some improvement. He later successfully commited suicide over a tremendous California cliff. True.

I think we can divide ourselves by empathy.

Some folks cannot seem to relate to either the joy or pain of others.

Memories are most susceptible to misinformation following a one-on-one conversation.

The problem for police investigators is that the witnesses start contaminating each other’s memories. But do you think a witness’s memory would be most prone to distortion following a big group chat about the event, or following a one-on-one conversation?

More at the British Psychological Society

People with greater “food insecurity” are more likely to be overweight (48.1 percent) and to have diabetes (37.9 percent) than subjects from food secure households (25.8 percent and 35.1 percent, respectively).

read more at the Science blog

“If all of your fans bought through iTunes rather than buying CDs at the record store you’d be looking at an overall reduction in income of 85%!”

Weird Al Yankovic Says Digital Is a Raw Deal For Some Artists:

“I am extremely grateful for your support, no matter which format you choose to legally obtain my music in, so you should do whatever makes the most sense for you personally. But since you ASKED… I actually do get significantly more money from CD sales, as opposed to downloads. This is the one thing about my renegotiated record contract that never made much sense to me. It costs the label NOTHING for somebody to download an album (no manufacturing costs, shipping, or really any overhead of any kind) and yet the artist (me) winds up making less from it. Go figure.“

Apple pays the labels $0.65 (some say its as high as $0.80) of the $0.99 cents paid for your song. So, for an album with the average 12 songs, Apple takes in $11.88. Apple sends the label $7.80 — 35%. The record label takes that $7.80.

…you could expect something like $45 of each thousand songs sold to be paid to you in royalties. That’s around 4% of the amount paid to Apple for your work, and around 5.7% of what was paid to the label.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are.

How public education cripples our kids, and why

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Graham Glass comments,
“…schools should aim to teach children to be leaders and adventurers,
not employees and consumers.”

People who want to take a swing at San Francisco should think twice. Yes, the Irish coffee at Fisherman’s Wharf is overpriced, and the bus tour of Haight-Ashbury is disappointing (where are the hippies?), but the Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous. Creativity is a key to economic progress. Authoritarianism is stifling. I don’t believe that Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were gay, but what’s important is: In San Francisco, it doesn’t matter so much. When the cultural Sturmbannfuhrers try to marshal everyone into straight lines, it has consequences for the economic future of this country.

NOTE TO REPUBLICANS: THE PARTY’S OVER by Garrison Keillor

Oil from the tar sands of Alberta Canada is expanding rapidly.

Production in Alberta is up 61 percent over the past four years. This year, Alberta’s oil sands are expected to produce 1.2 million barrels a day, roughly equal to the production of Texas.

However it’s extracted, all bitumen has to be transformed into oil in a process called upgrading. There are several different steps in upgrading, all of them using a lot of energy, usually natural gas. It costs $23 to $26 a barrel – depending on the project – to produce light oil from sticky goo of the oil sands.

Tar oil production will almost triple in the next 10 years.

CALGARY, Alberta – A massive rise in crude production from Canada’s oil sands region over the next decade will nearly triple the area’s call on strained natural gas supplies, Canada’s national energy regulator said Thursday.

Production from the oil sands of northern Alberta is expected to rise to more than 3 million barrels a day by 2015, according to a study by the National Energy Board, triple last year’s output.

Production might rise as high as 5 million barrels by 2020.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ forecast two weeks ago was higher than NEB’s at 3.5 million bpd by 2015 and 4.9 million bpd by 2020. Both said getting the increased oil production to markets must keep pace.

via Future Pundit

The USA imports about 25 million barrels per day consuming about 25% of all oil. Alberta’s bid to produce as much as 5 million barrels is a major shift in where dollars will travel.

Great writer, Colson Whitehead. Original, incisive. Clear and clean. Necessary.

bookofjoe says, “He’s that pure and gifted a writer. The first couple paragraphs of his debut novel, “The Intuitionist,” grabbed me and didn’t ever let go until I’d finished the book. It was so strangely different from whatever else is out there masquerading as original fiction. Whitehead is the real deal.

‘Apex Hides The Hurt’ is the story of a nomenclature consultant, a man whose rare talent is finding just the name to set a product soaring into the stratospheric heights of the economy and the collective needful unconscious.

“He loved supermarkets. In supermarkets, all the names were crammed into their little seats, on top of each other, awaiting their final destinations.

……………………………

“Isn’t it great when you’re a kid and the whole world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it. All those flying gliding things are just birds. Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it? He told himself: What he had given to all those things had been the right name, but never the true name. For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.

……………………………

“A name that got to the heart of the thing — that would be miraculous. But he never got to the heart of the thing. What is the word, he asked himself, for that elusive thing? It was on the tip of his tongue. What is the name for that which is always beyond our grasp? What do you call that which escapes?

……………………………

“He adjusted quickly to the recluse lifestyle, which was much more complicated than it appeared to outsiders, who enjoyed their invigorating jaunts outdoors and frequent social interaction without considering the underlying structures holding everything together. Keeping away from people, that was easy. Neglecting one’s physical appearance, that wasn’t too difficult either. The hard part was accepting that the world did not miss you.”

A call-girl’s story

“If light were a drug, the government would not approve it,” says Professor Charles Czeisler of the Harvard Medical School. And Professor George Brainard of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, adds: “Humans evolved on a planet without electric light over thousands and thousands of generations. The body is designed to be alert and awake during daytime hours and to sleep at night. Now we have a 24-7 society that isn’t in harmony with our biological design.”

Studies show that light at night interferes with one of the body’s greatest natural defences against cancer – melatonin, dubbed “the hormone of darkness”. The hormone – which is secreted by the pineal gland at night, and particularly in the early hours of the morning – both impedes the growth of cancers and boosts the immune system.

Sleeping with the light on or staying up late could be a cause of breast cancer, authoritative new research suggests.

The research – which is being hailed as a “watershed”, providing “the first proof” of a link between artificial light at night and cancer – confirms a mass of the studies suggesting that modern life causes the disease by interfering with natural sleep cycles.

Carried out by the blue-chip National Cancer Institute and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the United States, it offers a solution to the mystery of rising levels of breast cancer in rich countries, which are five times as high as in the developing world. One in 10 women will develop the disease.

Professor Richard Stevens of the University of Connecticut, who describes it as “a watershed study”, says: “Electric light as a driver of the breast-cancer epidemic worldwide – that’s a dramatic big thing.”

And Dr David Blask, who led the research – and calls it “the first proof that light is indeed a risk factor for cancer” – adds: “Breast tumours are awake during the day, and melatonin puts them to sleep at night.” Add artificial light and “cancer cells become insomniacs”.

Sleep Safely: What experts recommend

Shut out all light: Sleeping in a dark room aids production of neurotransmitter serotonin, which is crucial in making melatonin.

Get nine hours’ sleep: A Finnish study found that women who slept nine hours were one-third as likely to get breast cancer as those who slept seven-eight.

Get a red lightbulb: Place a red lightbulb in one fixture. If you get up in the night, only use this one.

Get outside in the morning: Just 10-15 minutes of morning light will send a strong time-keeping signal to the brain’s clock, leaving it less likely to be confused.

The story is at The Independent

The main active compound in marijuana leads to greater short-term impairment of learning in adolescent rats than in adults, according to researchers at Duke University Medical Center. The study directly compared the effects of delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) on the memory ability of adolescent and adult rats in order to learn if rats — and possibly humans — are more sensitive to THC at certain life stages.

read more

Purification without Chemicals? Yes, it’s possible and extremely effective.

• 2% to 3% of all food-borne disease are suspected to cause secondary long-term illnesses
• Food-borne disease cost the US economy approximately $37.1 billion yearly in medical costs and lost productivity

The PurPro process utilizes Activated Oxygen to naturally oxidize bacteria and fungi on food surfaces. This Activated Oxygen commonly called Ozone (O3) is a triatomic allotropic form of oxygen, which in a more simple definition means “Pure Air”.

Have you ever noticed that fresh, pure and clean smell in the air after a thunder storm? That is the smell of Ozone in a blue gas form.

The excellent cleaning ability of this natural antimicrobial PurPro process is completed by strong oxidation. Ozone, a very strong oxidizer, is non-selective against the target thereby penetrating its cell wall. Bacteria such as Salmonella, E-coli, Listeria Giardia and Cryptosporidium are killed on contact.

This PurPro process is much more effective and up to 3,000 times faster than chlorine.

Minimizing the occurrence of micro-organisms on fruits, vegetables, meats and other foods is a primary food-safety concern. At the same time, sanitizers – such as the chlorine used both to wash produce as well as disinfect processing equipment – may potentially harm the environment. Some consumers also prefer these by-products not be present as residue on the foods they eat.

One way the food industry can address food safety and the negative perception of some sanitizing agents is through the use of ozone treatment. Application of liquid and vapor phases of water saturated with ozone is gently applied to the product surfaces. Microbial contamination is reduced.

PurePro via Feed Biology

Simply put, Hilbertz has found a way to use sunlight to turn the minerals in seawater into limestone — accretion — depositing waterborne solids.

Autopia Ampere will begin as a series of wire-mesh armatures anchored atop a sea mountain. Once in place, they will be connected to a supply of low-voltage direct current produced by solar panels. Over time, electrochemical reactions will draw minerals from the sea to the armatures, creating walls of calcium carbonate, which is what us landlubbers commonly call limestone.

The fact that ocean-grown cities could stand on their own economically and become independent and self-governing entities poses what Hilbertz believes to be one of the biggest barriers to their creation. He says there is no legal precedent regarding national ownership of a newly formed island that is beyond a nation’s territorial waters.

from Popular Mechanics:

Mineral accretion technology was developed originally in the 1970s by architect Wolf Hilbertz to generate alternative construction materials The Army Corps of Engineers has used electrical accretion to build reefs and seawalls.

In 1980, I experimented with building mineral boxes by sending DC current generated by a windmill into submerged metal re-bar and screen. I imagined houseboat-sized barges could be manufactured, and this may become true someday.

 

Here are “startling numbers”. 80% of earners, which includes the middle class, have made only slight gains in income over the past 38 years.

But the percentage of income needed to purchase the median home has skyrocketed.

This is a table showing the income levels
and the ratio of a median home price to yearly salary in 1967:

Income Level	1967 Salary (2004 Dollars)	1967 Median Home Price (2004 Dollars)	Ratio: 1967 Median Home Price To 1967 Median Yearly Salary
Lowest Fifth	$7,668	$125,843	16.4 to 1
Second Fifth	$21,246	$125,843	5.9 to 1
Third Fifth	$33,918	$125,843	3.7 to 1
Fourth Fifth	$47,457	$125,843	2.7 to 1
Highest Fifth	$85,406	$125,843	1.5 to 1
Top 5%	$134,722	$125,843	0.9 to 1

Here is the same table, showing the data for 2004:

Income Level	2004 Salary	2004 Median Home Price	Ratio: 2004 Median Home Price To 2004 Median Yearly Salary
Lowest Fifth	$10,264	$221,000	21.5 to 1
Second Fifth	$26,241	$221,000	8.4 to 1
Third Fifth	$44,455	$221,000	5.0 to 1
Fourth Fifth	$70,085	$221,000	3.2 to 1
Highest Fifth	$151,593	$221,000	1.5 to 1
Top 5%	$264,387	$221,000	0.8 to 1

So what’s the conclusion?

Both young people and older people think that young people are happier than older people — when in fact research has shown the opposite.

Older people “mis-remember” how happy they were as youths, just as youths “mis-predict” how happy (or unhappy) they will be as they age.

The study is published in the June issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies, a major research journal in the field of positive psychology.

“Overall, people got it wrong, believing that most people become less happy as they age, when in fact this study and others have shown that people tend to become happier over time,” says lead author Heather Lacey, Ph.D., a VA postdoctoral fellow and member of the U-M Medical School’s Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine. “Not only do younger people believe that older people are less happy, but older people believe they and others must have been happier ‘back then’. Neither belief is accurate.”

The findings have implications for understanding young people’s decisions about habits — such as smoking or saving money — that might affect their health or finances later in life. They also may help explain the fear of aging that drives middle-aged people to “midlife crisis” behavior in a vain attempt to slow their own aging.

Stereotypes about aging abound in our society, link

Child abuse can cause schizophrenia.

The groundbreaking and highly contentious theory, co-presented by New Zealand clinical psychologist Dr John Read, has been described as “an earthquake” that will radically change the psychiatric profession.

Dr Read said: “I hope we soon see a more balanced and evidence-based approach to schizophrenia and people using mental health services being asked what has happened to them and being given help instead of stigmatizing labels and mood-altering drugs.”

Hammersley and Read argue that two-thirds of people diagnosed as schizophrenic have suffered physical or sexual abuse and thus it is shown to be a major, if not the major, cause of the illness. With a proven connection between the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia, they say, many schizophrenic symptoms are actually caused by trauma.

see more at the scienceBlog

warrantless

’nuff said